


by a thousand cuts

by Elendraug



Category: South Park
Genre: Gen, The Pandemic Special (South Park), growing up is hard and no one under-STAN-ds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-10
Updated: 2021-03-10
Packaged: 2021-03-16 16:53:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29952996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elendraug/pseuds/Elendraug
Summary: and this is not my private revolution; I don't need you to change, but sometimes I'm just not okay.
Relationships: Carol McCormick & Kenny McCormick, Karen McCormick & Kenny McCormick, Kenny McCormick & Stuart McCormick, Kyle Broflovski & Stan Marsh, Kyle Broflovski & Stan Marsh & Kenny McCormick, Randy Marsh & Stan Marsh, Sharon Marsh & Stan Marsh, Shelly Marsh & Stan Marsh, Stan Marsh & Kenny McCormick
Kudos: 6





	by a thousand cuts

**Author's Note:**

> happy early birthday, kenny ♥
> 
> I started this before they announced the new pandemic/vaccination special so I had to finish it on time before I could get jossed, lmao
> 
> I keep jameson around for writing stan. I also had fat tire on hand and was thinking about how how he should've bought that bike instead of getting sucked into a cult. in the course of writing this fic I found out that new belgium is based out of colorado
> 
> south park is one of the only fictional universes I’m aware of that has acknowledged the COVID-19 pandemic. almost everything else is in a surreal offshoot where none of this has ever happened. I think about that a lot.
> 
> a schoolbus comes down my street twice a day and I keep looking at it out the window and trying to remember what it’s like to ride one. they're so fucking loud. 
> 
> the [macfarlane set](https://mcfarlane.com/toys/the-bus-stop/) with stan and kenny at the bus stop kind of inspired this; it was so hard to find a moment they could talk with how much surveillance they're under. I remember very clearly how stressful fourth grade was for me in the 90s and it must be absolutely unbearable now
> 
> special shout-out to my pal who introduced me to k’s choice back in the day ♥ I'm glad they're still making new music
> 
> ♫ k's choice - [almost happy](https://youtu.be/hgEXMxFFfkY) | [private revolution](https://youtu.be/KSO4dALjnc8) | [bag full of concrete](https://youtu.be/CAEnmNumMek)  
> ♫ AJR - [100 bad days](https://youtu.be/2c4dB52ehAE)
> 
> please stay safe and support each other

_Q: Why is Kenny always dieing?? [...]  
[A: Because he's poor.](https://www.southparkwillie.com/SPFAQ/SPStudiosFAQ15.htm)_

* * *

“This sucks.”

“Yeah, it does.”

Stan shoves his hands in his jacket pockets, his knit gloves competing for space with a crumpled set of nitrile ones, stowed there just in case. “I want things to go back to normal.”

Kenny has no inclination to hide his hands, not since he’s learned to fight back fate with his fists. “Nothing’s ever been normal here, dude.”

There’s not much path to cross before reaching the curb, and not much room to drag it out. They’re reluctant to leave, like with a parent picking them up from a playdate and stalling departure through conversation amongst the adults. Stan’s aware of the implicit timer of the bus’ impending arrival, hanging over every outing coupled to potential exposure with any increased duration. Kenny’s always been aware of it, tracking the countdown to the inevitable end of this specific existence, knows it like the back of his hand even if he can’t see it inside a glove, whether the sense is closer to proprioception or phantom limb.

Stan glances carefully over his shoulder to see if anyone’s watching them, but the other students and any errant authority figures are busy with their own efforts to stay apart, applying mental blinders to narrow their focus upon too many tasks at hand, too many variables demanding attention at once, every lapse a potential vector for transmission.

There’s no pressure on him to choose only one friend to stand next to now that the decision has long since been made for him by apathy or chance. He falls into step beside Kenny, already sharing air at their designated lunchtime, a stroke of luck, some kind of compensation from the universe after Kyle was seated with Clyde on the far side of the table, split apart too distant for scraps of surveilled conversation. Those seating assignments stuck, as so many temporary things calcify into permanence, and over the ensuing months with holiday spikes in illness, Cartman and his mother have negotiated the paperwork and phonecalls to keep him enrolled in remote learning, while Kyle’s increasingly stayed home with Ike when it became too difficult to ensure his little brother understood the importance of keeping his mask on, or how he's especially at-risk with the juvenile diabetes he rarely discusses now that Scott's become such a target. The cafeteria is the closest Stan’s gotten to any official placement back within a bubble, after taking casual proximity for granted for so long.

But here, he’s gambled for a few minutes of pseudo-privacy in public, as lost in a crowd as they can be in these uncertain times, when the town has yet to truly be all in this together.

“I miss the bus stop. I miss walking to your house.” He catalogues the voids, the basic, simple routines of daily life: of smelling snow instead of his own recycled breath, dry air so crisp it stings, then and now a liability in flu season and always; of walking Sparky without fear of someone wanting to say hello; of making a face through a windowpane, unafraid of whoever exhaled on it before him. “I hate living so far away, on top of everything else.”

“At least you can join the video calls. We only have one iPad, and I mostly let Karen use it.” Kenny’s already accustomed to speaking into cloth, words mumbled into fabric until it's hard to hear him, his friends willing to pay attention, to invest the effort to decipher it, to accept the signal to noise ratio. “Nothing rescales right for my phone, if it can even run the shit they want us to use.”

“I hate that my phone knows where I am. It's like Child Tracker all over again.”

“More portable. Less conspicuous.” Kenny tilts his hand in a so-so gesture. “Sometimes I’m almost glad I don’t have the newest stuff, so they can’t make me deal with all that.”

“This whole thing’s a nightmare.” Stan drifts closer, willing the bus to be late, to delay being driven thirty miles away from everything he’s known. “Staring at somebody on a screen isn’t the same.”

“Like when your dad kept you at Blockbuster on Halloween?” Kenny laughs, and the fabric of his face mask shifts slightly but stays in place. “I’m too busy for our class’ shit, anyway. I’m basically tutoring Karen.”

Stan fights the impulse to pinch his nose, and rolls his eyes instead. “I keep worrying that my stupid dad is gonna bring it into our house. I think he lies to my mom about pretty much everything.” 

Kenny rocks on his heels, his soles bridging across the cracks in the concrete. “I thought they got divorced or something.”

Stan clicks his tongue, hyperaware of how much he’ll exhale if he sighs. “No. We thought he’d stay locked up last year. It was too good to be true.”

Kenny can tell he has more to say and lets the moment linger, just like they are, and waits in more ways than one.

“It’s like nothing I do to stay safe matters because his bullshit is what’ll get us sick.” Stan scuffs his shoe against the sidewalk, irritated with whoever’s still spitting out gum right now. “It’s so fucked, but I wish he wouldn’t come home anymore.”

He’s spaced out in class while crunching the numbers of contingency plans: what he’ll do if his uncle dies, if his mother catches it from him, if it spreads to his sister, if his grandfather finally gets his wish in the cruelest circumstances imaginable.

He’s ritualized every aspect of his day: gamified counting to twenty, then thirty just to be sure, scrubbing until he’s terrified of infection going through his skin instead. No amount of homegrown, half-assed hemp lotion can keep his knuckles from splitting in winter, constantly bandaging new cuts from constantly washing his hands and peeling off sodden adhesive from the day before.

He’s allowed himself to work through the worst possibilities: stocked up on what few supplies he can scrounge together, as if soap and soda and soup could be enough if he’s left to fight this on his own, in a field outside of an already overwhelmed mountain town.

He wants to ask Kyle about the ethics of feeling relief that his dad might die, but is afraid to hear his answer. Is it worse if he’s removed from his life by COVID, or CPS, or incarceration? At what point can he embrace escaping the rollercoaster of Randy Marsh? It’s not a conversation he wants to have when they can’t be face to face; it’s barely a conversation he wants to have at all. Kenny has his own perspective, not nearly as insistent to try fixing things that have no solution, pragmatic when picking his battles. 

He needs them both, needs their support more than ever, but is too tired to get into explaining it all; he’s always tired now.

“Stan?”

Kenny puts a gloved hand on his arm, as much reassurance as he can offer without overdoing it, without overloading Stan as he’s lost in thought. There’s an overlooked argument for an accurate assessment written off as misdiagnosis for its shoddy methodology; Mackey’s no better with recognizing comorbidities than the psychiatrists who cast a net wide enough to capture the whole class. Their counselor has no room to talk, bogged down by his own baggage and conflicts of interest, predictable in defaulting to punitive policies of lessened resistance.

The touch catches Stan’s attention long enough to meet his eyes, the only visible section of Kenny’s face between the mask and his hood. He remembers the vulnerability of the veal calves, the last time he felt so strongly about staying in his bedroom, unable to ignore the crisis of their learned helplessness as they lay there, waiting to die in their homes, separated from their families, chained up until they were forced out and sent to their deaths. He wanted so badly for them to run, but he couldn’t make them; they couldn’t even walk. They were born to die, unable to change fate for themselves even when freed, so damaged already by those who never intended for them to thrive.

Kenny wasn’t there, and he doesn’t know why not; he has hazy impressions of an empty hospital bed that he must be misremembering.

He thinks about whales, and whale calves, and confronting inaction.

He runs through a messy list of the familiar strangers he wonders about: the cattle rancher, any animal survivors from the PETA compound, Gary Harrison, Ike’s biological parents in Canada, the woman who was bullying his grandfather in Shady Acres, Trent Boyett, Marvin, the kids they met in Afghanistan, whoever owned the boat he wrecked. No one came to help them then, either, and he couldn’t even do it himself; everything he tried made it worse.

He wonders about Kip Drordy, alone and already living through parasocial relationships. He wonders about Thad Jarvis, and misses playing Guitar Hero with Kyle, when his dad still wanted to impress him; he misses band practice with Crimson Dawn, the only good thing about having a barn. What’s lead guitar without the bass backing it; he’s sick of playing solo.

He wonders how he can hold all this worry.

“While I was at Build-A-Bear—wait, weren't you at Build-A-Bear with us?”

Kenny lets his hand drop. "No. No, I was not.”

“Oh.” Stan can’t supply an explanation for the way his brain slides away from those details, but his memory’s been shit from stress for years now, and maybe it’s that simple. “Huh. Well anyway, I kept thinking that maybe I should stop fighting it. Maybe I should just go back to my life while I can. Maybe panicking about it all the time is worse.”

“It’s not.” Kenny shakes his head. “You don't want this.”

Even as he’s saying it, he knows what the answer will be, but he can’t stop himself from finishing the thought. “I don’t want to keep living like this, either, though.”

“Have you ever had a stroke? Have you ever drowned? Lost a limb, or all four? There are a lot of bad ways to die, and this covers a lot of them.” His expression is focused with an intensity Stan typically associates with playing superheroes. “It's lonely. Lonelier than usual. Lonelier than feeling isolated by video conferencing when at least you’re lucky enough not to be dying while talking to a tablet.”

“But not us, right?” Stan keeps bargaining, if only to see it through, if only to keep the conversation going while he can still do so in person. “Or we wouldn’t be at school.”

“Has this school’s administration ever done anything in our best interests? Why would they start now?”

Stan doesn’t answer.

“It _is _killing kids. They just stopped talking about it on the news, is all.”__

__Stan stares at him until he can’t anymore and has to avert his eyes._ _

__Kenny watches him, then, sees the tension set into his face through his clenched jaw, the defeated posture in his shoulders, depressed but not dead yet._ _

__It’s always poor kids who die and wind up forgotten by the news cycle, chalked up to acceptable losses of human capital on somebody’s spreadsheets of questionable profits. He’s lost track of how many times his parents have attended his funerals, inebriated or otherwise, or have failed to show up, on the occasions he’s even been memorialized._ _

__Stan's hands have held his viscera in moments he doesn't remember, and Kenny wouldn't remind him now even if he could get it to stick, unfair to inflict when they both have their own burdens to carry. He dies horribly but comes back healthy, and maybe he’s lucky not to contend with long-term effects of his short-lived suffering, if luck ever mattered._ _

__Kenny lets his glove brush Stan’s sleeve again, brief enough for plausible deniability if anyone were to accuse them of breaching the inconsistently-enforced rules. “I’ll tell you what I’ve told myself every time I’ve passed through Hell’s Pass: keep going.”_ _

__He tries to find his hand near his pocket, but before Stan can move his arm enough to accept the gesture, the bus arrives._ _

__The schoolbus is so loud as it brakes, the bare minimum of mandated maintenance and not a cent more, the potential lives saved supposedly not worth the financial investment or space in the budget, hanging off a perpetual fiscal cliff, leaving their bodies to be tossed around inside like canned goods ordered by mail. Its supposed safety is from the 70s, with grand claims of efficacy if all goes according to plan, if no rollover accident deviates from their predictions, if grade schoolers sit consistently with no variation from an ideal scenario, no mistakes, no third-party numbers. Children are permitted to pretend they’re not property right up until the moment their parents are inconvenienced, at which point they’re deposited for relative safekeeping, their care held to few standards so long as they sit still and shut the fuck up._ _

__Kenny’s willing to bet those kids from the studies would have wanted their lives saved, that their families would’ve preferred seatbelts. Too many times his parents have attended his own funeral and forgotten in the haze of the next high, or the frantic search for temporary employment. His mother lost her dishwashing job with the restaurant industry’s collapse, and she has too many DUIs to drive delivery and too much history with the town to pull off a fake ID; Stuart hasn’t held a job since the Amazon fulfillment center, and has left the daily logistics to his sons to work out in lieu of anyone else. With every passing day, his family’s shot at stability continues to slip through the deliberately widening cracks._ _

__Stan slips his hand back into his jacket, instead holding onto the past few minutes as tightly as he can, hoarding moments until they become memories he refuses to discard unless his brain gets the best of him._ _

__The afternoon sun glances off his mother’s yellow vehicle, still keyed across the hood despite his father’s self-inflicted, Sisyphean efforts to buff them out. A week from now, right before Kenny’s birthday at the equinox, this timestamp will be artificially declared brighter, the shifts in his circadian rhythms among many things he’s supposed to accept without question as he gets dressed in the dark after having just acclimated to waking with dawn. It’s asinine to switch the numbers assigned to the sun, to disrupt his sleep yet again, the most recent in a succession of subtle disruptions to what he’s expected to consider normal as every additional op-ed left open on the kitchen table, every faculty announcement emailed out, every statement from the mayor further manufactures consent._ _

__Even trying to navigate a school building that was familiar has mutated into an uncanny landscape of barricades and frantic signage, a hostile environment where he shrugs off being shot or sleeping under surveillance. He’s numb to it with the ubiquity of gun violence but still can’t breathe easy; he already has asthma, too afraid to inhale deeply for calming exercises, not with the pandemic and not with so much smoke in the house._ _

__Kenny nods to Stan and starts toward the bus, waiting to board as other students space themselves out. His body is crossed with both backpack and mask straps, a backlit orange swatch against the enormity of the vehicle, of their situation, of childhood naïveté. Everything could be simple, if the adult world was interested in supporting human beings instead of shareholders, if these institutions were genuinely committed to their supposed mission statements instead of exploiting people._ _

__Stan regrets his savings spent on Scientology instead of a bike as he’d meant to; neither could cure his depression, but he would have something to show for it, instead of summers spent trying to find the next scheme before he knew what it was he was squandering. If he could ride it all the way home from this distance, if he could just have that potential freedom instead of the crushing lesson of monetized misinformation. Everything is simultaneously infinite and impossible, endless potential just out of reach; he’s exhausted of having his earnestness weaponized against him._ _

__“Stay gold,” he chokes out, awkward as he raises his voice through a mask, as he draws attention to himself, but Kenny smiles over his shoulder, and Stan knows it’s sincere because it reaches his eyes._ _

__Kenny ascends the steps and passes the rows of taped-up, torn seats, the smell of exhaust a reminder that he still has his senses for now. When he reaches the far end he turns around, visible from the back window, waving until he’s sure Stan sees him._ _

__Stan waves back, until he’s left behind by the bus as it further forces the issue of both physical and social distance, beeping as it reverses before lumbering forward, until Sharon lightly honks the horn to catch his attention without completely startling him. He climbs into the car before they cause traffic congestion, dropping his backpack beside him onto the back seat, silent, while Shelly’s in shotgun with her attention on her phone. Sharon’s attention is on the road as she circles past Stark’s Pond to turn around._ _

__The intervening liminal space is thirty miles home of highway transitioning to rural roads, his brain coping with the speed at which landmarks pass by filtering out extraneous blurry visual data until he has trouble focusing his eyes at all. He’s afraid of whether his mom has been recirculating the air in the car, if it pulled in respiratory droplets from passersby—improbable but not strictly impossible—but how could any passerby be more of a liability than his own dad, with the gravest danger coming from inside the house._ _

__He blows a slight amount of air to see if it will reach the glass through the mask, and isn’t sure if he should feel disappointed or relieved when it doesn’t leave anything for him to draw in._ _

__Stan leans his head against the window, aching for autonomy, and allows himself to feel soothed by the motion of the tires on the pavement, by the cool touch of glass at his temple, by the quiet and calm as he closes his eyes, if only for a while._ _


End file.
